Snappy #39

We should no longer do proxy-related IO on the main thread now that Patrick McManus landed bug 769764. Synchronous proxy code resulted in a miserable user experience for people using proxies, but it also affected normal users during proxy-detection. This was one of the top intermittent freezes that we’ve seen.

Tab switching should be much faster in Firefox 18 than before. Jared Wein got rid of an expensive regexp that was applied during a tab switch in bug 781588. Jeff Muizelaar landed bug 792199 which should make switching to a image-heavy sites much faster. Jared’s change is already on nightlies, Jeff’s change should show up tomorrow if everything goes well.

Matt Woodrow landed the huge change that is DLBI in bug 539356 (yet again). DLBI speeds up reflows, reduces repaints resulting in a more responsive browser. For more details see Robert O’Callahan’s announcement.

Startup Regression

After working on improving startup for the last couple of releases we seem to have regressed it during the 18 cycle. I filed bug 798130 on this. I just noticed the regression a few hours ago. If anyone has ideas on what might’ve caused it, please comment.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2012 at 4:24 pm and is filed under snappy.
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13 comments

Thanks i like these snappy updates! I have noticed the startup lag on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:18.0) Gecko/18.0 Firefox/18.0 ID:20121004030525
my startup times have gon from 1 second two about 5 second and that is on a cor i7 and a ssd 3 gig of ram. I know it’s not a long time but it’s noticeable. I wood think if it has had a 4 fold slow doun for me on a ssd sum one on a hdd wood be much werce off.

Taras, I can reproduce the long *warm* startup (about 5-7 seconds, wall-clock time) on my quad-core HP 2560p with SSD and 8GB of RAM. Do you want me to follow the profiling instructions you provided pd in the last post’s comments?

Hi i am sorry it’s bin solong i have bin busy. I carnt use about:startup cus i am blind and using jaws which wont read the out put from about:startup. i am using 32 bit windows. i will try with ff 17 and let you no how it feels.